Head-canon and fugue (variations on TMI) - Ginny

[wemyss]

 

1. Harry always felt that those who - denominating themselves his ‘fans’ and supporters - considered that he’d ‘married beneath him’ in marrying ‘that Weasley chit’ were barking: they failed, he maintained, to know or understand Ginny’s quality, and that she was at the least his equal in courage, cunning, and tenacity. As Ginny pointed out, first tartly and by the end with resignation, he, in being too protective of her from the start, was guilty of the same failings.
2. She forgave him - more or less - even so, because she loved him and knew his limitations.
3. No one who ever truly saw her, with open eyes and mind, upon the Quidditch pitch, let alone those who’d seen her at Hogwarts consule the Carrows, could ever have doubted her fierceness, independence, and equality to Harry in sheer courage.
4. It was the courage that led her, after her girlish dreams of marrying the Hero had matured into realism, to marry The Most Tempting Target for the Ill-Disposed and Villainous, Ever, despite the risks.
5. It wasn’t, pace the tabloids and the gossips, her ‘putting her career first whilst she was young enough to play first-class Quidditch’ or any like consideration that led to her marrying Harry later than many (Molly, for one) should have preferred, and to their waiting a bit even after that to start grinding out sprogs. She was waiting on Harry to grow up, to realise that there was more to life than Duty and warfare, and that she was not a Tender Precious Flower to whom he might condescend and protect and keep in cotton wool.
6. It always privately amused her that ill-informed and malicious strangers asserted that she’d been the school broom at Hogwarts. Nev had had as unrealistic a pash as had been, at the time, hers for Harry, Corner was hopelessly wet, and Blaise had been only one of several lads whose desperate attempts to fix upon her then-tomboyish self had been part of his lengthy coming-out process (there’d been Colin, and Dean, and others, and she’d suspected that Harry wasn’t wholly dissimilar in that to Blaise, Colin, and Dean, although she and Harry alike had taken their obligations seriously and had been quite honestly in love).
7. She knew she’d attained maturity when she could keep both Luna and Hermione as friends, and recognise that between them they were the complements of her heart and her head, emotion and reason to either side of her.
8. She’d idolised Bill, and Charlie - never the anything-save-heavenly Twins or Ron - but it had been Percy who’d been her stay and comforter when young. That is why even after his reformation and return she never could wholly forgive him.
9. She’d given over idolising Harry well before her own seventh year at school. One cannot idolise a Friend of Ron’s who stops with one’s family and show himself mortal by leaving his toothbrush about without putting it in a glass, picking Mum’s rather stringy Sunday joint from between his teeth with a thumbnail, and hogging the loo.
10. It had been when she realised she loved him anyway, and not as a Heroic Ideal, that she’d become serious about him as a possible suitor.
11. She was very much Arthur’s daughter. She wasn’t as dotty about Muggles as he, but when she discovered the BBC and 5 Live, the Match of the Day, TMS, and such programmes as GQT, she’d been hooked.
12. And badgered Lee Jordan, as the post-War Director General of the WWN, to adopt similar programmes for sport and gardening: which is what first caused her to contemplate a post-Quidditch second career in sport journalism. (Lee, being George’s best mate, was ridiculously easy to badger.)
13. Unlike Hermione, she wasn’t a Principled Feminist who combined intellectual conviction with a secret dislike of most other women. She demanded equality on merit, not first principles.
14. She liked gardening - but only flowers, not veg. And after growing up with Special Responsibility for Poultry at the Burrow, manure included, she swore never to deal with another chicken or duck, not even on a menu.
15. She was never certain that she and Harry were sexually compatible, but they were assuredly sexually combustible. Keeping the number of offspring to a manageable three had been no easy task. (Even now, she’s been know to spy pervily from portraits at her widower: they both find it a private jest.)
16. She knew what they say about gingers and temper and stroppiness. And did not object to proving it.
17. James Sirius was her favourite because he was such a Weasley, and such a Gryffindor, and was the eldest as she had been the youngest, and because he was obsessed with Quidditch from his cradle.
18. Albus Severus was her favourite because he was Harry all over, with Hermione’s amount of brain, and was a little like Percy as Percy ought to have been, and because - unlike James (and Ron, and James’ grandfather and namesake, and Den Creevey), and entirely like Harry, and even dear Nev - he was courageous not because he didn’t know fear but rather because he always overcame it.
19. Lily Luna was her favourite because Girls Rule OK and because she was her daddy’s girl just as Ginny had been Arthur’s and because she was less learned but a damned sight cleverer and more cunning than Al and because the Youngest Must Stick Together. Well, that and because even as a baby, Lils was Death From Above on a Broom, to Jamie’s utter frustration, Which Was Good for Him and Built Character (as well as being hilarious to watch).
20. Once she was no longer under Molly’s eye, she realised she did, actually, like cooking - but not the sort of things Molly liked her to cook. Frustratingly, Harry had to be educated first, but she eventually got him away from roast beef and spag. bol. and oxtail and bangers-and-mash. (She had discovered that so long as she pleased him at the end with a sound English pudding, she could inveigle him into eating trout stuffed with prawns and fines de claire and all sorts.)
21. She never did quite patch things up with Fleur, but she was rather fond of Gabrielle. The sisters’ varying degrees of regard for Harry had a good deal to do with that. She’d never forgotten nor yet forgiven Fleur’s initial Tri-Wizard Tournament dismissal of Harry, after all.
22. Oddly, she did come to tolerate and even in some measure to like Dudley. And to tolerate Malfoy. Partly because, unlike Phlegm, they were both so damned remorseful, although Malfoy tried to dissemble that. And because Harry wished to mend things with Dudley as being Family, After All, and with Malfoy because, once Al met Scorp, there really wasn’t any other choice.
23. She knew Al was gay long before Al did.
24. And accepted Scorpius, who really was a Vast Improvement Upon His Ruddy Father, if you asked Ginny. Or even if you didn’t. She’d tell you anyway.
25. Ginny and Narcissa became really rather close, after a fashion. However: no reference to Lucius Malfoy whatever was to be made in her house, her presence, or her hearing. In this she was not fire, but steel.
26. She could not bear the name ‘Tom’, nor were her children permitted to keep journals.
27. She was specially fond of George’s Young Fredders, but really wished that in his search for a role model (‘Wizard, mixed-race or Black British, must be gay, send discreet Owl to _____________’) he’d chosen rather Dean than Blaise. Although he did a catwalk slink better even than Blaise when he wished, mind you.
28. If George and Ange wished to allow Freddikins to pierce his nose (and she preferred not to speculate on anything else), that was their pigeon, but she was damned if her children were any of ’em going to do likewise in any way at all. In many ways, Hermione was her favourite sister-in-law. To a point. So long as it was understood that Hermione did not in fact know ‘all there was to be knowed’, was not to insist on editing Ginny’s prose, and cannot have been all that clever if she married, as she did, quite the most tiresome of all Ginny’s intensely tiresome brothers.
29. Ginny tried, really she did, but she could never teach Hermione to fly well.
30. Nor wean Ron from his ridiculous loyalty to those hapless buggers the Cannons.
31. Harry might have been the Wellington of Wizardom (and Ginny knew something about that, after all: as Arthur’s name suggests, the Wellesleys were the Squib branch of the Weasleys), surrounded by Creeveys and Cro(a)kers; but she was damned if she were to be another Kitty Pakenham.
32. She never lost her nerve, her pride, her curiosity, and a certain recklessness - or her Bat-Bogey Hex. There was a reason her sibling relationship with the Twins was a trifle complicated: they were all of them too much alike, really.
33. Of course, that’s what got her killed, in the end, when Lily was rising thirteen; but she went out in a last blaze of red Weasley fire, as she’d have wished to have done. Harry yet mourns her - and for quite some time reverted to the stick in the mud she’d kept hum from becoming: until her portrait gave him a Howler-quality flea in the ear and boot up the arse, naturally. It works yet, as it ever did, and Harry’s not altogether certain she can’t even yet Hex him when he’s in want of it. He doesn’t chance it.